This book explores the reflections of women in the global North whose “doing good” work is aimed at improving conditions for other women. It addresses global North-South dynamics in various spaces ...and locations and brings migration and development together, by using a combined sample of women working for organizations that operate internationally across North-South divides and women who work for local organizations targeting migrant women. The research findings are based on a close analysis of interview material that draws on feminist and global citizenship / civil society theories, and postcolonial and critical development literature. As “complicit sisters,” the women of this study share some gendered experiences with the women they seek to support; at the same time their subjectivities and positionalities are intertwined with the inequalities and power relations that their work seeks to address. The book’s chapters capture the subjectivities and relations that underpin the women’s engagement, by providing an analysis of the women’s self-understandings with respect to their work (chapters 2 and 3), the relations with those they support (chapters 4 and 5), and their conceptions of the Other (chapter 6). The book discusses ways to move beyond dominant frames of relationality and concludes that the women do not only want to “do good,” but are keen to “do it right.” By demonstrating the continued relevance of critiques articulated by black, antiracist, postcolonial, feminist activism and scholarship, the book at the same time underlines a durability of structures of inequality that cannot simply be countered by increased individual awareness and reflexivity.
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